4 ms·

How about getting the browser and OS makers together to use an alternate DNS system? It only needs Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft to agree and ICANN can

• rocqua 7y ago
  Where do we put the DNS root then? If you want oversight and international consensus it cannot be placed within a country. Only option I see is to put it under the UN but that will probably ramp up the politics.
  • rapnie 7y ago
    Yes, have 'access to the internet' a universal human right and a UN body to work towards that goal, managing domains.
• hk__2 7y ago
  > It only needs Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft to agree and ICANN can be made irrelevant overnight. Of course not. The Web is only a small part of the Internet. DNS is used by way more services than Web browsers.
  • kijin 7y ago
    The aforementioned companies make more than web browsers. They make entire operating systems. If an OS changes how it interfaces with DNS, it will affect every service that runs on the OS. To be honest I don't see this happening any time soon with the major commercial OSes. But in Linux you can install some programs to e.g. send all your DNS queries through a certain encrypted tunnel, and nearly every application installed on that box will happily use that tunnel.
  • Brian_K_White 7y ago
    But the value of preserving your existing address exactly, including .org on the end, mostly only exists in browsers, where humans find things initially. Actually, I bet by now it doesn't even matter that much even there any more. Consider how the search in google already forms an effective alternative dns for many actual humans attempting to manually go somewhere. If you have a .org domain, you can change all the non-browser uses of the domain pretty easily. The tools in the background of things don't care what the names are. You can change them and it's really not that much of a disruption. Once someone finds your site, via their browser, you can populate that site with whatever kinds of urls and directions and references you want. Just like no one really cares how ugly and long all the urls to actual things other than the front page are. Your site can include say, the directions to access your API, and those directions don't have to say foo.org in them. Even existing api users that break if you have to change your name, can react to that change easily enough. Email is probably the biggest problem. We will all simply have to never pin too much dependency on any single email address. But we already have to do that, so no loss. If you had set up your own domain so you weren't at the mercy of google killing your gmail account and killing your ability to prove ownership of everything else in your life, well you would just need to have more than one email registered with everything like paypal etc. So me@mydomain.org can break and you don't die from it. You just better realize your domain is going to break and unregister those emails everywhere before it goes into someone else's hands. Because when someone else owns a domain, then they can receive all emails sent to any name at that domain, including "reset password" mails. It's not the most fun passtime, but it's not necessarily the end of the world either. It really is human interactive web browser usage where the exact name matters most. So if cloudflare and google simply sent browsers to the right place and ignored the traditional root authority for .org, or any other name lookup, that would pretty much be good enough. Google could do it already without even violating dns just through search results.